Roosevelts

I'm in Albany, NY. It's not the same as New York City, but it still feels like I'm in kind of in the middle of action here. My first night at the hotel, I watched a Brooklyn Nets and a NY Knicks game on TV. In the West I would follow the Trailblazers. At 300 miles, they're the closes pro team I've got. Back East, they're everywhere.

This week I'm not far from Hyde Park - about an hour and a half. Hyde Park is a cute little town and is the home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. A month ago I watched the PBS series called The Roosevelts. I taped the 14 hours it was on, but only got 12, because we had a power outage when one of the shows came on. Aaaarrrggghhh! Whatever became of Theodore anyway? I guess now I'll never know.

There are actually two cool houses in Hyde Park. FDR had built a separate house for Eleanor. While it seems like a nice gesture, it is a possible sign their marriage was not a match made in heaven. Eleanor's is called Val-kill. I learned that kill is a Dutch word for stream. So Val-kill is like Valley Stream. The FDR house is the more important and well known of the two, but I've been there before. So I think I got enjoyed Eleanor's place more. Eleanor, probably our most effective and least attractive (sorry, Eleanor. Beauty and accomplishment are inversely proportional. Us uglies work harder than the beautiful people.) First Lady, had a nice place in a nice secluded setting. Nice, but not a mansion by any means.

Our tour guide was a small, probably 80 year old, black lady. She was very hard to understand and you had to really concentrate to get what she was saying. But about halfway through she let us know that she knew Mrs. Roosevelt years ago. How cool. Because of that and the stories she could tell about what Eleanor was really like made it a great tour.